lled out, my feet broke through under me, and for an instant I
hung at the side of the nest in the air, impaled on a stub that caught my
blouse as I slipped.

There is a special Providence busy with the boy.

This huge nest of the fish-hawks was more than a nest; it was a castle in
very truth, in the sheltering crevices of whose uneven walls a small
community of purple grackles lived. Wedged in among the protruding sticks
was nest above nest, plastering the great pile over, making it almost
grassy with their loose flying ends. I remember that I counted more than
twenty of these crow-blacks' nests the time I climbed the tree, and that
I destroyed several in breaking my way up the face of the structure.

Do the blackbirds nest here for the protection afforded by the presence of
the hawks? Do they come for the crumbs which fall from these great
people's table? Or is it the excellent opportunity for social life offered
by this convenient apartment-house that attracts?

The purple grackles are a garrulous, gossipy set, as every one knows. They
are able-bodied, not particularly fond of fish, and inclined to seek the
neighborhood of man, rather than to come out here away from him. They make
very good American rooks. So I am led to think it is their love of
"neighboring" that brings them about the hawk's nest. If this surmise is
correct, then the presence of two families of English sparrows among them
might account for there being only eight nests now, where a decade ago
there were twenty.

I was amused--no longer amazed--at finding the sparrows here. The seed of
these birds shall possess the earth. Is there even now a spot into which
the bumptious, mannerless, ubiquitous little pleb has not pushed himself?
If you look for him in the rain-pipes of the Fifth Avenue mansions, he is
there; if you search for him in the middle of the wide, silent salt-marsh,
he is there; if you take--but it is vain to take the wings of the morning,
or of anything else, in the hope of flying to a spot where the stumpy
little wings of the English sparrow have not already carried him.

There is something really admirable in the unqualified sense of ownership,
the absolute want of diffidence, the abiding self-possession and coolness
of these birds. One cannot measure it in the city streets, where everybody
jostles and stares. It can be appreciated only in the marsh: here in the
silence, the secrecy, the withdrawing, where even the formidable-looking